Become a Fantasy God with Pinyadda

Desperately trying to fill the gaps in your fantasy roster? Looking for a few sleepers to make a play for in pre-season trading? Trying to find the hidden gems in your league and come up with ways to beat them? Look no further. Whether you want to read fantasy news from around the web or just keep up with specific teams, Pinyadda’s got you covered. Here’s a quick look at five potential fantasy spoilers and everything you need to follow them on Pinyadda.

1. Sam Bradford, St. Louis Rams. Though it pains me to say it, Bradford looked sharp against the Patriots last week and has proven to most analysts that he has the skills necessary to post numbers at the NFL level. He’s not a fantasy starter, but if you can pick him up on the cheap I’m willing to bet he’s got a couple of big days up his sleeve this year, especially given the Rams’ relatively weak schedules. Follow the St. Louis Rams topic to keep up with Bradford’s progress throughout the year.
2. LaDainian Tomlinson, New York Jets. LT is getting old, but he’s not done yet. Rex Ryan’s strange coaching mojo seems to have breathed some life into the organization and it appears that Tomlinson’s buying whatever he’s selling. While Tomlinson may not get the bulk of the carries, expect him to break at least one a game for 20 or more. And don’t forget that he led the league in receptions a few years ago – he might do better than your #1 receiver on some weeks. Follow the New York Jets topic and the Jets Blog to track LT’s work as a Jet.
3. Clinton Portis, Washington Redskins. Mike Shannahan knows how to get the most out of his backs, and Clinton Portis is undervalued in most leagues this year. If he can (and his offensive line) can avoid the injury bug this year, Portis will get plenty of chances to gain quality yards and score valuable fantasy points. He’s a known quantity and offers predictable point totals during most of the regular season. The Washington Redskins topic and the Redskins Blog have you covered with all the latest on Portis, Shannahan, and the rest of the Skins.
4. Michael Vick, Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles, no matter how you slice it, are still a mess. Anyone who thinks Kevin Kolb is going to last the whole season has a better sense of humor than I do. Will Vick’s output be predictable? No. Does he have legitimate potential for a few insane weeks that could make or break your matchup? Absolutely. If you can pick him up late, do it. If you can afford to hang on to him he might make the difference in close heat down the stretch. Follow Philadelphia Eagles and the Bird’s Eye View blog in the Philly Enquirer to stay up on the latest drama in Philly.
5. Pierre Garcon, Indianapolis Colts. When you catch balls thrown by Peyton Manning, it can be easy to be overshadowed. But Garcon’s ability can’t be doubted, and though he may not yet be a name-brand receiver just yet, anyone who’s suffered a spanking at the hands of the Colts can tell you that Garcon is one of Manning’s favorite targets. He runs a lot of 15-30 yard seam routes that Manning thrives on against cover two zone defenses in the middle of the field. He’s a great pickup who’s almost guaranteed to have a decent performance every week. Follow the Indianapolis Colts topic and Stampede Blue to see how Garcon can help you score this season.

Pinyadda is your place to find all the pro football news and updates you can handle from across the web. Follow the teams you want, discuss articles with other fantasy gurus, and never miss an injury report or roster change again. For more information on using Pinyadda to help you crush it this fantasy season, check out our post on using Pinyadda to dominate your fantasy draft. And don’t forget to follow the Fantasy Football topic to keep up with the latest trends and analysis from fantasy blogs and commentators all over the internet.

Do you want your blog to get found? Are you looking to drive new, loyal readers to it? Do you want to expand your thought leadership? Are you tired of your tweeted links evaporating? Do you want to create conversation around your content?

Whether you’re blogging for yourself or your business, Pinyadda’s platform allows you to connect your content with the people interested in it and create community around it. Here are the top 5 reasons you and your blog should be on Pinyadda:

Reach new readers

When you publish a post on your blog, Pinyadda places it into topic-based feeds. People choose to follow these topic feeds so if, for example, your post covers mobile and social media, anyone following those topics will see the post in their feeds. Many people discover new sites from posts they read in their topic feeds and in turn follow that site. While the average online news reader visits 2-4 sites regularly, the average Pinyadda member follows 12-16 sites!

Users also discover new sites by visiting the Newsstand on Pinyadda, an interactive way to connect people with the content, sites, and people who match their interests. For example, users can find recommended sites related to a particular topic. The Newsstand is also the first place new users are dropped when they register for Pinyadda, so it is one of the most frequented visited pages by the community.

Curate your posts

You actively curate your content within the Pinyadda community by sharing it (we call this pinning), perhaps asking a specific question about the content or summarizing what it is about. When you pin an article, everyone following you on Pinyadda will see that you shared it (similar to a tweet on Twitter) and they can then pin and discuss the article too, passing it along to their friends and followers. These pins also hit a community feed that people visit to discover what’s currently being pinned and discussed on Pinyadda.

Reward your top readers

People who pin and discuss your blog posts regularly can become the Ambassador of your site. This is part of what we call value mechanics on Pinyadda, automatically rewarding your top users, and allowing them to boast the status on their profiles. Knowing your Ambassadors also allows you to get to what other content they follow and the people who follow them.

Establish influence

Another part of Pinyadda’s value mechanics are topic Mavens. You become the Maven of a topic that your blog covers by pinning and discussing news and blog posts related to it. Mavens and Ambassadors are featured heavily in the Pinyadda community – from feed pages and the Pinyadda Newsstand to our weekly newsletter and blog posts where we promote all the top people and influencers on Pinyadda. Being featured in this way means more people will follow you on Pinyadda and find your blog’s content.

Create community

As you begin to pin and discuss your posts as well as other articles, you will begin to create community around your content. Regardless of whether you are discussing your own blog posts, other content on the same topic your blog covers or general news, this activity on Pinyadda is inbound marketing for your blog. Once people feel that they have a connection with you and see you as a real person, they’ll be much more likely to help evangelize your content and come back for more. As any social media pro will tell you, it’s all about conversation!

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How do you use Pinyadda with your blog? Let us know in the comments!

Here’s why Pinyadda is the best way to share news on Twitter, including examples from our community:

Know the best articles and blog posts to share

Pinyadda is like your personal assistant for news and information. Instead of having to go site-to-site or do searches (and often dig) for the news and blog posts that you want to click on, Pinyadda sifts through the firehose of content for you and collects the articles and posts you’re most likely interested in. Pinyadda serves the good stuff to you in real-time, filing each article as it’s published into clean pages you can browse based on topics, sites and people you follow (click for a quick 30-sec video overview).

With Pinyadda, you know the articles you’ll be into sharing to Twitter without lifting a finger:

• Want to tweet about news on a particular topic? Go to that topic page and see articles being published about it from sites across the web on everything from your city or favorite sports team to things like celebrities, food, social media, autos or green tech.
• Want to tweet articles from your go-to sites? View a feed of what’s been published most recently from all your favorites, and if you have one site in mind go to it’s individual feed page. (Tip: Here you can even tell Pinyadda to show you only articles published from a few sections of that site. It’s great for big sites like Boston.com where you may only be interested in a couple sections, like sports and events.)
• Want to share an article that lots of people are talking about? Go to your Home feed to see what articles people you follow are sharing (we call it pinning). You can also toggle to the “All People” feed to see what’s buzzing in the whole community on Pinyadda — lots of people use Pinyadda like a digital water cooler to share and discuss articles with groups of friends and colleagues, so you can always find great stuff.

Craft engaging news-related tweets

Since people use Twitter for different reasons, we designed Pinyadda’s integration with it with flexibility top of mind. This way you stay in the drivers seat of your voice and can mold your tweets as you like. Here are examples of some of the most effective ways to share all the news goodness on Pinyadda to Twitter:

1. Share a headline. This is the most basic way to share news to your Twitter followers. Just copy and paste the headline from the feed into the comment box. It’s straightforward, easy, and gets the news out quickly to your followers. (Tip: If you you want to legitimize the source of the link, include its Twitter handle, e.g. I know Boston.com is @bostonupdate.)
   
2. Share a quote, main point, question, or data point from the article. These are great ways to shake up how you share news articles to Twitter. These often grab your followers attention better than a straight headline, and shows you’re putting some TLC into your tweets.
   
3. Add value to the article by including your own commentary. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, opinions, or simply add some humor to the news you share with your followers.
   
4. Direct an article to a Twitter follower. Often when we read an article we think of someone – be it an inside joke, something that will help them in their job, or is relevant to other aspects of their lives. If the person you’re thinking of isn’t as ahead of the curve as you and on Pinyadda too, include their Twitter handle at the beginning. (Better yet, invite them to Pinyadda!)
   
5. Share a discussion to Twitter. If you’re part of or come across a great discussion on an article on Pinyadda that your followers on Twitter would like, simply enter  something like “check out this great discussion about X” when sharing the link to Twitter. (Tip: Combining #4 and #5 is killer if you know someone’s really into a subject,e.g. tweeting “thought you’d want in on this convo.”)
6. Promote a site you think is great. If you come across a site on Pinyadda you want your Twitter followers to know about, simply visit that site’s page and click on the big blue “share this site” button. You can even customize the message you want to tweet out with it.
   
7. Share your profile on Pinyadda to Twitter. Want people to know what topics and sites you follow, how many followers you’ve gained, and what you’ve pinned on Pinyadda? (We like to call this your news graph.) Simply tweet out the URL to your Pinyadda profile or include it in your Twitter bio.
8. Share your Yadda shwag to boost your cred on Twitter. Pinyadda’s points system allows you to compete to earn coveted spots as the “Maven” of topics or “Ambassadors” of your favorite sites. You can also unlock fun badges (some even have coupon codes attached) just for pinning the news you’re into. For example, we teamed up with the marketing gurus over at Hubspot and you can earn their Inbound Marketing Ninja badge set by pinning inbound marketing news. You can share all this cred by clicking on what you’ve earned from your profile. Want to be the Maven of Twitter?  Sounds like it’s time to get your yadda on!
   

Connecting Pinyadda to your Twitter account is easy.

Connecting Pinyadda with your Twitter account is simple. Choose an article you want to tweet, enter text you’d like to tweet in the comment box, select the Twitter checkbox, and hit the “Pin it” button (click here for a 30-second video). If it’s your first time doing this you’ll be prompted with a pop-up to enter your Twitter username and password. Once that’s done, the text in the comment box and a unique short URL will hit your Twitter feed.

When one of your Twitter followers clicks on the link, they’ll be brought to a page with the article. If the text you entered in the comment box exceed Twitter’s 140 character limit, Pinyadda automatically truncates. Rest assured, because when your Twitter followers click the URL they’ll see your full comment.

To manage your Twitter account on Pinyadda, visit the Contacts tab of your settings. There you can even see who out of the people you follow on Twitter are also on Pinyadda.

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Do you have other examples of great ways to share news to Twitter?  How can we make sharing links to Twitter better for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

First, the shutdown. In what may be an example of the Alamo strategy I described last Friday, Gannett made the decision to shut down the print publication of one of its small UK-based papers, the Hounslow – Brentford Times, formerly the Chiswick Times. According to MediaBistro, both publications will go online-only starting this week. The decision ends a run of continuous print publication that’s lasted for over a century. Somewhat ironically, an article on the web version of the publication describes the paper’s storied history and runs a large picture of the first printed edition. We may as well get used to these announcements and start to embrace the print eulogy as a new genre that everyone should master. Whatever Gannet’s motivations, it seems like the hard reality of print economics is starting to set in for everyone.

WikiLeaks this week released over 9,000 military documents, causing quite a stir among the media elite and prompting several discussions about the place of such an institution in the larger media landscape. Almost every media outlet published about the documents and their implications for the confluence of national security, freedom of information, and journalistic integrity. It’s a debate that’s sure to continue. While my own thoughts on the topic aren’t yet fully formed, I found a wealth of great opinions and commentary in the Media feed on Pinyadda, including this great post from our friends at the Nieman Lab, this post from Dan Kennedy over at Northeastern which includes a great comment thread, this interesting comparison between these documents and the Pentagon Papers from Mediaite, and yet another great rumination on the subject from James Fallows at the Atlantic. There are tons more opinions out there and we’ll be tracking the spread of this story through our index in the coming days. Regardless of your own position on the behavior of WikiLeaks in this incident, it’s certainly an interesting study in the emergence of an important new outlet in the news industry.

On a lighter note, the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night saw the news media play a crucial role in the development of the acclaimed series’ plot, as lead character Don Draper’s botched interview with Advertising Age led to unrest within his fictional ad firm. The show ended with Draper taking another interview, this time with the Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to right the ship. While perhaps not the most scientific study, the episode got me thinking about the changing role of newspapers in our public relations and marketing landscape. Set in the 1960′s, the shows characters had no other choice of outlet – any large-scale public image campaign had to run through the newspapers. But what would a firm in a similar situation do today? It seems almost obvious that they’d turn to social media and the web instead of the staid print institutions of today. Instead of a single reporter sitting in a smoky room, it’d be the crowd asking questions:  ”Who is @dondraper?”

To get your daily fix of great news from around the world of media, be sure to check out Pinyadda’s Media topic. From breaking news to in-depth analysis of the news industry’s past, present, and future, we’ve got you covered.

Investigating Pinyadda’s index for items tagged ‘Inbound Marketing’, I searched for popular title strings.  The data below displays the six most common strings from the Inbound Marketing feed.

“Social Media” was the most common Inbound Marketing topic while “SEO” was the second most.  I assume that the difference between these two will continue to increase as companies continue to shift resources from search-based marketing to social marketing.  With this in mind, I believe we will begin to see less Inbound Marketing pieces revolving around Google (search-based) and more revolving around Twitter and Facebook.

LinkedIn-related pieces accounted for less than 1% of Inbound Marketing items.  I’m unsure why LinkedIn seems to be an unused resources for lead regeneration.  Are there any heavy LinkedIn users out there that can shed some light on this?

Data posts from Pinyadda are created using Pinyadda’s index- a database of article links, titles and meta-data from thousands of websites.  The titles and meta-data are analyzed to determine what the article is about.

As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors.  This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example.   Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.

In the past several years, the Internet has turned the news and greater media industry on its head – everything from content creation to distribution has completely changed.  This has created problems for both consumers and publishers.  For consumers, discovering and accessing the news that is most valuable to us has become overwhelming.  For publishers, developing a strong community and converting that community into hard dollars has become incredibly difficult.   At Pinyadda, we have designed our platform specifically focusing on the evolved news and media landscape, hosting what we call the “news graph“.

The individual parts of the news graph have existed for a long time (post about this coming soon).  With Pinyadda, we are focused on connecting these critical parts and providing more value to the different entities within the news ecosystem.  We have studied how our behavior as news consumers has changed and have provided simple tools for enabling each individual user to get the information they need from the sites they like, the topics they follow and from interesting people.  For publishers, we have focused on providing an open distribution platform aimed at extending publisher’s reach and exposure through automated distribution and organization.  This framework will provide the foundation to enable publishers to capture more critical data and eventually monetize the distribution of their content.

While we have experienced tremendous growth in the short time our platform has been open, we are still young and focused on making improvement to best serve our community of users and publishers.  Our intention for this post is to start of on-going discourse regarding the evolution of the news graph, which we invite you all to contribute to.  We believe the news graph is a critical component to ensuring that consumers have an effective way to access the best information available for their unique interests and needs, as well as enabling publishers to capitalize on providing quality content.

Coming soon: The Working Parts of the News Graph

I think the API model is a great example for the newspaper industry. It allows them to stop worrying so much about their distribution problem and get back to doing what they do best – producing content. Let the rest of the developer community worry about finding ways to get the news to readers. But I’m not so sure the Times thinks about their API this way, and the announcement that they’ll be erecting a pay wall in the coming year seems to reinforce that doubt.

It seems like the Times sees this API as a way to establish itself as the definitive archive of all events past – the lens through which history is viewed and dissected. As such, it will be incredibly valuable, allowing historians and documentarians to uncover meta-trends and write fascinating feature pieces about them (who they’ll get to publish those pieces, well…). But when I think API, thanks to Twitter, I think “now.” I think about developers building great experiences around the wealth of content that belongs to the Times, about innovative new ways to organize and discover its content, about new solutions to the old media problem. The Times’ management, I fear, does not share my sentiments.

If the pay wall goes up – and I’m not entirely convinced it actually will – the API either becomes far less useful or far more useful, depending on the restrictions applied. I find it hard to believe that it will exist in its current form, with open access to all articles one hour after publication. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The point of all this rambling, you ask? The point is that the Times seems like a two-headed monster to me. Half the time, they do everything right – the first to truly incorporate lots of multimedia, the first to successfully incorporate the blog form, the first to understand the web as an opportunity and not a threat. The the other half of the time, they seem trapped in the same delusional nostalgia that’s handicapping the rest of the industry – the display ad run-around, the formatting stalemate, and now the paywall. I suspect that there’s considerable internal tension between these two forces as well. And I’m not sure who will win.

Maybe the pay wall will work for the Times. But its life span, as far as I see, is inherently limited. No matter what we believe in, no matter how long it takes, the price of content will eventually reach zero. There’s just no way the generation that’s coming up behind us will swallow a monthly fee for access to a publication that holds no emotional or collective social value for them.

I give the Times credit for trying something – anything – to stop the revenue drain that’s been their standard operating procedure for the last few years. But they should keep looking for a long-term solution – one that’s closer to the API than the pay wall.